Kids enjoyed a play date with Old Man Winter yesterday while their folks and other snowbound New Yorkers spent New Year’s Eve digging out from the great snowstorm.

“That was my sled when I was their age,” said a proud Ken Schafer, as his 9-year-old son J.T. whisked down a hill in Central Park. He said the wooden vehicle had been passed down in his family over several generations.

Not everyone was waxing nostalgic about the storm, which dumped a foot of snow in the city and more in the ‘burbs Saturday.

Mayor Giuliani, who praised the city’s Sanitation Department’s cleanup efforts, lobbed a few verbal snowballs at the Port Authority after touring the five boroughs in a helicopter, remarking that Kennedy Airport looked like “the North Pole.”

“The Sanitation Department did a far better job with a whole big city to plow than they seem to be doing at the airport,” Giuliani said. “There’s still a tremendous amount of snow at Kennedy Airport, and they’ve had a long time to plow it.”

Allen Morrison, a Port Authority spokesman, dismissed the criticism, saying all three airports had the necessary runway capacity since 6 p.m. Saturday. Morrison said most of yesterday’s airport delays were due to schedule changes by the airlines.

At La Guardia Airport, stranded passengers not lucky enough to get one of the 200 cots and 500 blankets provided by the Port Authority spent the night on cardboard boxes – and were a little creaky and cranky.

Ron Krol, stretched out shoeless on a cot near the American Airlines ticket counter, blamed poor forecasting for his family’s weekend plight.

“They said it wasn’t going to come until 10 o’clock,” said Krol, who, along with his wife and daughter, had tickets for a 6 a.m. flight. “I would have been long gone by then.”

Getting in to the city was no easier than getting out. Hundreds of weary New Yorkers hoping to make it home from Florida for the New Year were left stranded at area airports as their flights were delayed or canceled.

“I promised my girlfriend I’d be back in time to go to Times Square,” moaned 17-year-old Selwyn Schwartz of Queens, who had been vacationing at his grandparents’ in Miami Beach for the past week.

“Now, I’m not going to make it.”

Bobbie Baxter of Merrick, L.I., spent hours at the airport in Miami on her cell-phone trying to arrange an alternate flight.